Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Mortgage Lead Conversion Rates Revealed

Kaleidico.com, the lead management software firm, released the above chart recently on their site. Great move on two levels.

1. It got me back to their site and considering their product for the first time in 6 months.

2. Even if it is a parlor trick, and you question the reliability of the data, it is the direction that the mortgage/lead gen industry needs to move in. Regardless of the motives of Root, Leadpoint and others seeking to create an exchange for mortgage leads, the industry is still distributed by brand, as evidenced in this chart. This type of competitive intelligence must be developed to the point that it is reliable. Is greatly needed and appreciated.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Paul,

I appreciate the endorsement of the widget.

I will tell you it is NOT a parlor trick. First, I will talk a little bit about how the lead marketwatch widget gets its numbers. It is automatically generated from the aggregate data of all of our icoSales lead management software clients. It is the reflection of application rates, by marketing channel, as actioned by our clients. It reflects a current and previous day's 7 or 30 day moving average (depending on the widget you are reviewing). The data is the data we do nothing, but run the script.

Why are we offering this, and soon other, market indicators? Interestingly enough it generated out of a couple of request we have received on both the buying and selling side of the equation. Intuitively, you can see why lenders might want to know this information before they make the first major investment in leads (most lead providers require a minimum of 500 leads--thousands of dollars in investment). However, we have had just as many requests from the lead providers because once they transmit the lead they rarely get any positive feedback. So, it is hard for them to tune their marketing mix or make improvements. We think the lead marketwatch widget does both well.

Thanks for checking out the product again and hopefully I can call you a customer soon. If you or any of your readers have any questions you can contact me directly. Bill Rice, 734.782.0808 or bill [dot] rice [at] kaleidico [dot] com

Bill, your widget is certainly interesting, however, I'm curious as to whether it's a true "apples to apples" comparison of lead providers. Might you be able to add more data concerning relative sample size of leads [and if possible, some measurement of the overlap of lead providers among your lenders]? This would add more credibility to the data and ensure that a lead provider isn't artificially inflated [or diminished].

Bill, I encourage you to keep going with this. There is much more detail that you might possibly report, such as sample size (as Brian mentions), purchase vs. refinance, state by state performance, and other detail that would help all of us understand and appreciate the data for what it is. Good stuff!